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Bot Colony Wiki
Welcome to the Botcolony Wiki Bot Colony is an episodic adventure game, differentiated from other games through the player's ability to engage in intelligent English conversation with the game’s characters. It is the first video game ever to incorporate unrestricted, intelligent English dialogue as an integral part of gameplay. The game was designed by Eugene Joseph, the founder of North Side Inc., the Montreal based company developing Bot Colony and the natural language understanding technology behind the game. Development history The first Bot Colony storyboard dates to October 2007, when North Side decided that producing a video game was the best initial application of the company’s natural language understanding and natural language generation technologies. The development of the game was stalled by the parallel development of North Side’s language pipeline, which required most of North Side’s resources. Additionally, the company invested in its own game engine, Anitron, as a test-bed for researching the integration of 3D graphics with language. As Anitron lacked rendering, it was decided to re-host the developments made in it to a commercial game engine, Havok Vision.her traditional programming languages. North Side Inc. started research on its NLP technology in 2002, and at least initially, the business plan was to apply English to rapid scripting of simulations and scenarios. This goal is actually fulfilled in today’s game, which is scripted entirely in English, as opposed to being programmed in C++, LUA or other traditional programming languages. North Side believes that the ability to script the entire game in English will enable extending the Bot Colony world with user-generated content, where players and characters designed by them intermingle in a MMO environment.The closed Alpha of Bot Colony was started in March 2013 and was extended in June of the same year. Setting Bot Colony is set on Agrihan, an island in the Marianas in the Pacific, in 2021. Agrihan has become the private island of Nakagawa Corp., a large Japanese robot company, which relocated its R&D and manufacturing facilities there. Nakagawa’s fierce competitor, the North Korean KHT Corp., was relentlessly attempting to spy on Nakagawa in Japan. Nakagawa relocated its facilities to Agrihan to accommodate its rapid growth, but also to have a sanctuary out of KHT’s reach. A 900 m tall volcano covered with lush jungle rises from the center of the island, surrounded by pristine beaches and coves. The traditional Japanese village on the island’s western shore contrasts with the skyscrapers housing Nakagawa’s R&D and living quarters on the northern side. People intermix naturally with robots in Agrihan. As Nakagawa’s robots will play a major role in the colonization of Mars, they need to achieve a high degree of autonomy. Therefore, Agrihan is mostly staffed with robots, and hence the name Bot Colony. Plot The player takes on the of a specialist in robot cognition, who occasionally accepts challenging assignments involving white-collar crime. Nakagawa Corp. calls the player and offers him a mission: investigate the disappearance of three new-generation sensors. The player is warned that KHT may have infiltrated the island and will stop at nothing to get its hands on the sensors. The game starts with the player landing in Agrihan, also known as Bot Colony. When the player doesn’t walk, he or she flies through the island in a futuristic hovercraft, sails around it, or uses rickshaw robots to move on its roads. Robots travel between facilities on the island using a specially designed monorail. The player’s mission evolves from finding the sensors to chasing the North Korean spy who has indeed infiltrated the island. The first part of the Bot Colony novel relates how KHT managed to infiltrate Bot Colony. This part of the story is publicly available and can be downloaded from the official website. Towards the game’s conclusion, the player is instrumental in preventing the outbreak of global war. Gameplay The player is engaged in an investigation that is initially launched to find missing robot sensors, and culminates with the discovery of the spy and preventing the destruction of the island. The key is how the story is experienced: while in other games, the player only controls the movements and interactions of his character, in Bot Colony the player speaks for himself or herself. The player is responsible for discovering the story through dialogue with the characters, rather than reading it from a dialogue tree. A key gameplay experience is the interactive exploration of the artificially intelligent characters – robots reprogrammed by the devious spy to do as people do,3 learn about human motivation and emulate human behavior. While engaged in the adventure, the player probes the boundaries of knowledge and understanding of robots, and trades knowledge about humanity for robot information that will enable him to move on in the game (see below). Like in real life, knowing who to trust is key. While the game is in general inspired by the book, the latter is not a manual for playing the game. The book will be of interest to players who want to understand the Bot Colony world at a higher level, or understand linguistic issues in man-machine interaction. The gameplay often diverges from the book: for example, in the game there is combat against mutinous robots, and Jeff Philips has to prove that he his human. The player will need to control robots, vehicles, or cranes to complete missions. He/she will play cards or trade in the Bazaar, discuss food with a robotic waiter in the restaurant, train robotic animals to do tricks on the kabuki stage, or investigate a crime against a robot in Old Nakagawa – all this to gain new information allowing him/her to advance in the story. The player enlists a robot’s help to break into hotel rooms in his search for the elusive Korean spy, or free hostages imprisoned by robots for the greater good of humanity. To compensate for the freedom afforded by unrestricted user generated dialogue, intelligent help is provided in the form of Miki-05 (the player's PDA) through a conversational interface. What makes Bot Colony potentially more immersive than other 3D games is the need to converse in order to advance in the game. This is an advancement over current state-of-the-art video games, where the player has to choose a pre-canned selection from a dialogue tree. Intelligent dialogue opens the door to unique gameplay: the player discovers the story organically by querying characters about their environment and events they witnessed, guiding robots through complex tasks, negotiating transactions with robots and teaching them new concepts and new animations. These conversation-based interactions are mediated by speech-to-text and text-to-speech solutions integrated into the North Side dialogue pipeline as client and server side components. As the robustness of the language capabilities increase, North Side hopes to extend these conversational capabilities to human characters without affecting suspension of disbelief. Dialogue technology and comparison with previous games and chatbots Until Bot Colony, dialogue in videogames took the form of dialogue trees, essentially canned choices from a list (for example, Mass Effect, Hotel Dusk, The Last Express and older text adventure games), voice commands (End War, Sega Seaman), or an attempt to key on a word or extract a sentiment from the input (Façade, Starship Titanic). In Bot Colony, the player speaks freely, asking questions, seeking clarification, or requesting the characters to carry out actions, and the game attempts to respond intelligently. If the game does not understand the player, it will seek clarification. An integral part of gameplay in Bot Colony is experiencing machine intelligence interactively (as opposed to science-fiction novels and films, which are media that transfer information one-way). North Side relies on deep semantic understanding of language, which is very different from how Chabots work. Chabots appear to be ‘intelligent’ and may be entertaining occasionally, but it is difficult to maintain this illusion throughout an extended conversation. Chatbots serve ready-made answers incorporating words or clauses previously uttered (or typed) by previous users; this makes a Chatbots seem responsive for a small number of dialogue steps (Jabberwacky, Alan, A.L.I.C.E). They become evasive and change the subject when faced with precise questions. Façade relies on word polarity and a shallow processing of language, rather than deep semantic processing as in Bot Colony. The deep semantic processing in Bot Colony is implemented as a dialogue pipeline under the supervision of a Dialog Manager. This pipeline includes parsing, disambiguation, co-reference resolution, reasoning, and generation components, and is structured around a formal ontology. Query Answering has a different slant in Bot Colony than in QA systems such as DeepQA (Watson). A Bot Colony character can answer factual questions, but it can also answer questions about the 3D environment and the events it witnessed. This ability to reason about the environment as well as about facts is a major innovation, and a stepping stone on the way to achieving common-sense behavior and passing the Turing Test. Quantifying language understanding in Bot Colony North Side’s dialogue software is the key technological innovation in the game. While North Side is not claiming its software passes the Turing test, the Bot Colony game incorporates significant advances towards a credible, realistic dialogue capability. The company's initial objective is to understand language well enough in order to enable a player to complete the levels of the game in an enjoyable way, and/or improve their English by playing the ESL version of the game (Bot Colony – Play to Learn). When the software does not understand the player, it will seek clarification and learn from the answer. This clarification and learning process is an integral part of the Bot Colony gameplay. Finding examples where a robot won't understand the player is not difficult. The player’s real challenge is to communicate coherently and clearly, so that he or she gets through to the character, is understood and advances in the game. This style of speaking is referred to as Literal in the Bot Colony novel – it is the language spoken by robots. Literal is more than just correct English – required in the first version of Bot Colony – but rather a conscious effort to structure one's message clearly and make it intelligible to the hearer. This includes uttering parsable text, and ensuring that all referring expressions can be resolved. Therefore, bad syntax, undefined terms and rambling sentences should be avoided in the game. Speaking in Literal is an exercise in communicating clearly. The language software is designed to understand English at large and is not tied to the Bot Colony game in particular. The company's research work on understanding natural language confirmed that the harder problem is the lack of sufficient world knowledge, as opposed to language processing per se: things that are obvious to a person are not known to a computer – but they are needed to understand the context of an utterance. The language software attempts to extract the correct meaning from a player’s utterance, irrespective of the particular words or syntax used, and attempts to link it to a familiar context. This means that a player may formulate the same message in many different ways and the game will extract the same semantics in all cases. Natural-language based scripting Bot Colony is not programmed in a traditional way. All game logic, animations and interactions are entirely scripted in English. English-based scripting will enable players to extend the game world with their own content. A script describes in simple English how a game entity should react, when its context and probable goals are taken into account. North Side hopes that its use of controlled-English as a scripting language will enable players to extend the world by adding their own content. This English-based scripting technology has additional applications, for example to rapid visualization of movie scripts, workflow visualization, evidence presentation, and exploring alternative courses of action. English as a second language and Bot Colony Bot Colony has application to teaching English as a second language. The current state of the art in teaching English online involves pairing pictures with words, and picking the correct answer from multiple choices. In Bot Colony – Play to Learn TM, the emphasis is on practising spoken English, and getting live, pertinent feedback about one’s individual mistakes. Bot Colony strives to offer an experience roughly equivalent to conversation with a (human) English teacher, who corrects errors and provides feedback during the dialogue. Players with pronunciation problems will be able to see what a character thinks he/she said, and retry until the character understands correctly. Players are also able to practice their written English by typing instead of speaking. This is similar to what flesh-and-blood English tutors do – correcting in real-time, or marking papers. Conventional computer-based ESL offerings do not match this performance, as they lack semantic understanding of English. The ability to provide customized feedback on specific mistakes means that playing the game can lead to improving one’s English - in an entertaining way. Playing to learn has been proven to be an effective learning method,6 as the student is really motivated – to have fun. Bot Colony emphasizes learning English in practical, real-life situations where one has to speak the language to deal with day to day challenges. This is more immersive than doing online grammar exercises. Studies have shown that literacy and analytical thinking are correlated to a higher standard of living of a society.7 Bot Colony has the potential of helping improve both, and make a positive contribution to the life of people in developing countries. Eugene Joseph and the evolution of Bot Colony Computers, which are now so highly integrated into our lives, must be programmed to do anything useful. However, programming is complex. Empowering end-users to do tasks previously accessible only to programmers and working at a higher level has been a lifelong pursuit for Eugene Joseph, the author of the Bot Colony novel and the lead designer of the game. The first part of this quest involved visual interfaces between people and machines. Eugene founded Virtual Prototypes (now Presagis) in 1985, to realize his idea to replace hardware with touch sensitive, fully functional equivalents. Virtual hardware and data-driven displays were to be designed visually, and connected through plugs to data. Augmented transition networks (ATN’s) were used to handle events in context. The result was VAPS, currently the de facto standard standard for the design of complex real-time, data-driven graphics displays of the type found in cockpits, cars and other embedded systems. VAPS users design animated 2D displays visually, test them using simulation, and then generate portable, verifiable, optimized C++ code that implements the same displays on a target platform, such as an avionic or vehicle display. Virtual Prototypes also pioneered flexible flight and tactical simulation. These simulations were initially intended to generate the data needed to simulate VAPS displays and enable dynamic evaluation of human interfaces, but eventually became successful products on their own. The second part of the quest involved language-based interfaces to machines, the North Side motto. The current North Side technology can process language semantically, in the context of a 3D environment, inhabited by intelligent 3D characters that can be controlled through a natural-language interface. This technology powers the Bot Colony game, and has additional entertainment and training applications. In the longer term, Eugene hopes to evolve the current technology to realize his vision of concept animation, where a user describes a real-life scenario in his/her words, and sees it come alive on the screen, animated and behaving intelligently. This technology will be made available widely to create animated 3D content easily and rapidly. Some of the challenges are encapsulating character knowledge and personality, and depicting more abstract information. As the characters in Bot Colony learn from their users, a natural evolution of Bot Colony will be towards a MMO game in which the characters of different users compete in some area (as in a Jeopardy!-style game for robots) or cooperate in a task. At that time, users will also be able to design their own 3D content, independent of the Bot Colony game. They will deploy their own intelligent characters in a 3D environment they Reviews and Criticism In an article published in the Communications of the ACM , Robert M. French argues that "the time has come to bid farewell to the Turing test" and that "Attempting to build a machine to pass a no-holds-barred Turing test is not the way forward in AI, regardless of recent advances in computing technology".8 In a later issue of the Communications of the ACM, Bot Colony creator Eugene Joseph replied to French's article claiming his company North Side Inc. was "making good progress" towards the goal of passing the Turing test and provided videos of game play as proof. In the same issue French replies to Joseph and suggests that his claim is "delusional, cynical (perhaps in order to attract financing), or shows he does not fully understand how incredibly difficult it would be for a machine to actually pass a carefully constructed Turing Test. " Joseph's final response can be found on the Northside blog: http://northsideinc.com/blog/. From a review in Wired: "Joseph concedes that it wouldn’t pass the Turing test, but says, “Language coverage should be fairly high, including idiomatic English, so it should be able to talk about almost anything. The real problem arises because computers lack knowledge of the world."10From a review of Bot Colony on http://www.coolest-gadgets.com: "Apparently, the game can “understand” me, but there were several times where it clearly misunderstood me. Also, I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing in this game, so I was sort of at a loss for words. I’m guessing that this game, when it is finally perfected, will be like playing Myst but instead of clicking on things to get further along in the game, you will have to ask the right question. You may have to word it precisely, if this demonstration is any indicator." create rapidly, and invite others to experience their creation - a 3D animated short or a 3D game. Category:Browse